Abstract
On February 15, 1932, the Mothers’ Clinic Committee (MCC) opened a birth-control clinic for poor women of all “races” in Cape Town. Just like the Race Welfare Society (RWS), the MCC opened its clinic within easy reach of destitute and working-class women. Also like the RWS, the Cape Town group implemented clinical procedures established by clinics in London. It modeled their clinic, including its name, after Marie Stopes’s famous Mothers’ Clinic, which opened in Holloway, London, in 1921. But unlike the Women’s Welfare Centre in Johannesburg, the Mothers’ Clinic was an immediate success, quickly attracting and maintaining a steady stream of users from a range of racial groups. Its success was a direct reflection of the MCC’s liberal, feminist ideology, as it perceived women and their needs in a far more sympathetic light than did the RWS. Through their demonstrated willingness to utilize the Mothers’ Clinic, the poor women of Cape Town played a crucial role in the expansion of medicalized reproductive health care — not just in their city but throughout South Africa.
This work is… of such grave importance to the health and happiness of many poor women and their families.
The Mothers’ Clinic Committee1
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Notes
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© 2004 Susanne M. Klausen
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Klausen, S.M. (2004). The Cape Town Mothers’ Clinic. In: Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_6
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